“Conventional wisdom maintains that we are slowly recovering from a recalcitrant recession. As we are now entering at least the third year of real economic contraction, continue to reel from the predations and corruption in a financial sector the federal government treats as sacrosanct, are in the sixth year of a plateau in worldwide oil extraction, and climate change is essentially unmitigated, it should be obvious that American society is arrantly unsustainable—ecologically, fiscally, economically, politically, and ethically… We’ve got a whole culture locked in the first stage of Abraham Maslow’s five stages of human development: infantile self-gratification.”David Orr, Oberlin College